Friday, 4pm. Hackathon starts at 9am Saturday. I needed a landing page for "Lunchbox" — a dumb little app that picks what you should eat based on what's in your fridge. The last page I hand-built ate a full Tuesday night and still looked like a resume template; I'd budgeted this evening for a static site generator instead. The page was live the same evening; the template-to-link stretch is the thirty seconds the title means.
The 30-second version
I'd heard of x-rush and assumed it was a meme-image thing. Wrong. I registered with email, no card, no phone. The workbench has four module tabs across the top; I clicked Text and the whole surface went teal, #00D4AA on every tab and button in it. The color ends up doing real work: teal means you're in text land.
Left nav: HTML Studio. Using a platform template costs nothing: it copies the code into your project as a ready workspace, no AI involved. I previewed "Product Hero," flicked the device-width menu to phone size to check the stack, then opened it.
The editor splits in two: files and code sit on the left, the running page on the right. The headline placeholder took "Lunchbox" on my first click, and the preview re-rendered before I lifted my finger. Subhead swapped, both button labels changed (Get Lunch / See How), a screenshot URL pasted into the placeholder. Call it 90 seconds; the title is rounding down, sue me.
Publish asked one question: a plain share link, or a full community listing. I took the link. An automatic safety check ran, a toast appeared, and I had a URL that opens for anyone: x-rush.ai/p/lunchbox-3e7c. I texted it to two friends. One replied: "Nice, you spent all afternoon on this?" No. I spent it eating dinner.
The orange-button incident
Around midnight I "improved" the buttons. Orange, with a font that belongs on a pizza box. Old me would have re-edited until 2am, reconstructing the first version from memory.
Instead I opened the version history. Every publish stays in it; nothing ages out. I previewed the first version, hit Republish this version, and the public link flipped back to the clean page. My draft kept the orange experiment for further crimes. Total damage: zero.
The AI edit has a tollbooth
Saturday morning I wanted a contact form. I don't build forms often enough to keep the input types in my head, and I wasn't hand-styling validation on four hours of sleep.
The Workflow Copilot panel is one input box with no modes. I typed: "add a contact form under the hero — name, email, message; validate the email; submit shows a thank-you." It read the current file first (it said so), then returned a diff, green for added and red for removed, readable line by line.
Then nothing happened. The diff sat there with a button underneath it: Execute change · 0.5 credits. I went hunting for an Apply button; there isn't one. That priced confirm is the only switch the Copilot has. First reaction: friction. Second reaction, once the form worked in the preview: this is why my balance outlived my enthusiasm. My own edits are free and unlimited. The AI writes only when I pay the half credit on purpose.
A follow-up edit came back with field spacing I hated. One Undo and the whole AI change vanished, code and all. One restore per edit, and the draft had been autosaving the whole time anyway.
Plain questions in the same box bill differently: a site-wide pool charges 0.5 credits per ten successful assists, routed by task like everything else. I never see which engine answers; the pool shifts as new models land.
AI Chat: the character I built to bully me
AI Chat lets you define your own character. I built "Grumpy Reviewer." Its whole setup, verbatim: "Terse. Skeptical. Assumes I'm wrong until the code proves otherwise. Flag anything that looks lifted from Stack Overflow without being understood." The sarcasm in its replies is my fault. I asked for it.
I pasted the Lunchbox page's JS. Three complaints came back, all fair.
Characters don't share a thread, though. I hop from Grumpy Reviewer to Cold Cuts and back mid-argument, and each conversation is exactly where I left it. My code reviews never leak into trivia.
Automations: the 7:30 fact
Cold Cuts is my trivia character (the name is a deli joke; Lunchbox deserved one). I wanted one weird food fact a day. Automations met me with a gate: a job runs one character, that character must live in my current project, and it can't already carry a job. Annoying for a minute, obvious after that. The job doesn't get its own brain. It runs my character whole (persona, background notes, the chat we've already had), so the character has to exist before the schedule does.
The config is one form, six steps. Three mattered to me: the task requirement, verbatim, "one weird food fact a day, under 60 words, on theme for a lunch-decider app, always with a linked source." Web search on, because a food fact without a source is a rumor with confidence. And the schedule: daily at 07:30, timezone saved explicitly so a trip can't quietly reschedule her. The confirmation preview lists the whole setup and the price per run; enabling was free, and the runs are the only bill. I paid for one trial at the normal price; it arrived flagged as a trial, and it was the real product.
Monday 07:30: no popup, no sound. The site-wide chat bubble had one unread waiting, and the fact was already in Cold Cuts' chat, marked as an automated run: "the first household refrigerator cost more than a car in 1922," source linked. Continue-chat lands in her thread with that message under my cursor; replies from there bill as ordinary chat.
She's words only; the page photos are still mine. Nothing interrupts me while I work — the count waits. As someone who mutes every app within an hour of installing it, this is the correct amount of notification.
The loop I didn't plan
By Sunday the hackathon page was almost secondary. Cold Cuts drops a fact at 07:30, the good ones become post ideas, Grumpy Reviewer tears apart whatever copy I draft for them, and the surviving sentence goes on the page. One character feeds the other; the editor takes the wreckage that's left.
Lunchbox did not win the hackathon, for the record. The page is still up, the version history still holds every publish including the orange night, and Cold Cuts hasn't missed a 07:30 yet. A tool that keeps every version, prices the dangerous button, and stays quiet until asked has earned a second week.
Where to go deeper
- Text module overview — the whole text surface at a glance
- Smart page generator — templates, the priced Copilot confirm, and publishing
- Auto content generator — scheduling a character and reading its runs
- AI characters & chat — building a character from scratch